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August 3, 2008

With increased attention being paid to Afghanistan and nuke-neighbor Pakistan, it's useful to review how unbelievably wrong (or traitorous) John McCain has been on global matters, even as he spurts assertions of his mastery.McCain, Anthrax & the Afghan BlunderBy Robert ParryAugust 3, 2008The scene of John McCain – during the anthrax attacks in October 2001 – opining to David Letterman that Iraq might be responsible underscores McCain’s central role in what may go down as one of the biggest strategic blunders in U.S. military history, the premature pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq.Not only has it been clear for many years that McCain’s speculation about Iraq’s role in the anthrax attacks was reckless – made even more apparent by the FBI now pinning the crime on dead U.S. bio-defense scientist Bruce Ivins – but McCain also told Letterman in that Oct. 18, 2001, interview that “the second phase is Iraq.”

In other words, barely a month after the 9/11 attacks and while the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan was still underway, McCain was already eying a war against Iraq.

McCain opened his appearance with the joke, “What is Osama bin Laden going to be for Halloween?” and then gave the punch line: “Dead.”

However, bin Laden managed to survive that Halloween – and apparently six others – in part because President George W. Bush didn’t commit enough U.S. ground forces to the battle of Tora Bora, allowing bin Laden and other key al-Qaeda leaders to escape.

Then, instead of staying focused on the challenge in Afghanistan and finishing the hunt for bin Laden, Bush heeded the advice of McCain and other neocons and shifted the attention of the CIA and the U.S. military toward Iraq.

Though federal investigators cast aside McCain’s suspicion of an Iraqi link to the anthrax attacks, McCain continued to pin other false charges on Saddam Hussein’s government, including allegations about illicit WMD and supposed operational ties to al-Qaeda.

In it, McCain laid out the full neoconservative case for turning U.S. attention quickly toward Iraq.

“The next front is apparent, and we should not shirk from acknowledging it,” McCain said. “A terrorist resides in Baghdad, with the resources of an entire state at his disposal, flush with cash from illicit oil revenues and proud of a decade-long record of defying the international community's demands that he come clean on his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.

”A day of reckoning is approaching.”

On March 19, 2003, Bush fulfilled McCain’s dream by launching the invasion of Iraq, succeeding in ousting Hussein’s government in three weeks but then finding a large U.S. expeditionary force tied down by a stubborn insurgency for the next five-plus years.

[...]Al-Qaeda’s Iraq strategy was summed up in a letter that a senior al-Qaeda leader, known as “Atiyah,” sent to Jordanian terrorist Musab al-Zarqawi in December 2005, urging Zarqawi, who was leading the "al-Qaeda in Iraq" contingent, to tone down his aggressiveness and take more time because “prolonging the war is in our interest.”

[To view this excerpt in a translation published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, click here. To read the entire letter, click here. ][...]Aided by the superficiality of the U.S. news media, McCain so far has been able to escape any significant criticism for his role in the central blunder of the “war on terror,” the premature pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq. [my bold][...]Having not dealt decisively with the Taliban/al-Qaeda threat in 2001-02, the U.S. military now anticipates many more bloody years battling for Afghanistan and may have to conduct more cross-border aerial attacks inside Pakistan, possibly destabilizing that nuclear-armed country.

In many ways, this worsening Afghan fiasco can be traced back to McCain’s loose speculation about anthrax and his neoconservative pronouncements of almost seven years ago.

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Brute force, no matter how strongly applied, can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom and dignity. It is not enough, as communist systems have assumed, merely to provide people with food, shelter and clothing. Human nature needs to breathe the precious air of liberty.-His Holiness the Dalai LamaI believe that to meet the challenges of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not just for oneself, one's own family or nation, but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the key to human survival. It is the best foundation for world peace.-His Holiness the Dalai Lama